Obama says he would have beaten Trump

President Barack Obama said in an interview released Monday that he would have beaten Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump “if I had run again,” delivering an implicit criticism of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which he said acted too cautiously out of a mistaken belief that victory was all but certain.

“If you think you’re winning, then you have a tendency, just like in sports, maybe to play it safer,” Obama said in the interview with former adviser and longtime friend David Axelrod, a CNN analyst, for his “The Axe Files” podcast. The president said Clinton “understandably … looked and said, well, given my opponent and the things he’s saying and what he’s doing, we should focus on that.”

Obama stressed his admiration for Clinton and said she had been the victim of unfair attacks. But, as he has in other exit interviews, he insisted that her defeat was not a rejection of the eight years of his presidency. To the contrary, he argued that he had put together a winning coalition that stretched across the country but that the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign had failed to follow through on it.

“I am confident in this vision because I’m confident that if I – if I had run again and articulated it – I think I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it,” the president said.

“See, I think the issue was less that Democrats have somehow abandoned the white working class, I think that’s nonsense,” Obama said. “Look, the Affordable Care Act benefits a huge number of Trump voters. There are a lot of folks in places like West Virginia or Kentucky who didn’t vote for Hillary, didn’t vote for me, but are being helped by this … The problem is, is that we’re not there on the ground communicating not only the dry policy aspects of this, but that we care about these communities, that we’re bleeding for these communities.”

Axelrod, in an interview with The Washington Post, said he believed Obama went further than he had before in critiquing Clinton’s campaign.

“This was all in service of making the point that he believes that his progressive vision and the vision he ran on is still a majority view in this country,” Axelrod said. “He chooses to be hopeful about the future.”

Obama stressed that he doesn’t plan to get involved in day-to-day responses to a Trump presidency, just as former president George W. Bush has remained mostly on the sidelines during the Obama years. But Obama made clear that he will be more of an activist in the long run. He said he plans to help mobilize and train a younger generation of Democratic leaders and will speak out if his core beliefs are challenged. He also said he is working on writing a book.

His post-presidential “long-term interest,” Obama said, is “to build that next generation of leadership; organizers, journalists, politicians. I see them in America, I see them around the world – 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds who are just full of talent, full of idealism. And the question is how do we link them up? How do we give them the tools for them to bring about progressive change? And I want to use my presidential center as a mechanism for developing that next generation of talent.” He said he didn’t want to be someone “who’s just hanging around reliving old glories.”

This story was originally published December 26, 2016 at 7:59 PM with the headline "Obama says he would have beaten Trump."